Yesterday my wife said to me, "I guess the guys came and picked up the breaker..." because in its place (where it was standing for 2 months) only the tarp remains. I am hoping that Peter and the guys from Oriole Landscaping picked it up, because if it was anyone else, they would have had a heck of a time getting it into a vehicle; the thing weighs over 100 pounds! Anyway, I was really glad I could use it although it took a little bit of getting used to. I am sure that the pros out there would think I was crazy not going to a quickcut saw, but the neighbors certainly appreciated that I was not cutting bricks

Well just before we went on vacation, I cut the last stone, dug the weeds, cut the grass and threw down some bark mulch so that we could see what the whole thing would look like done. Or 99% done. I just got a push broom so I could sweep in the "Polymeric Sand" into the cracks and call it complete. Oh and I almost forgot: I have to rebuild the little door that keeps critters from going under the deck. While I was putting down the bricks, I also decided to run some watering pipe under one stretch so I could hook up the soaker hoses on either side of the garden, instead of running the hose back and

Well, I have made some progress since the last post thanks to working on the cutting in the evenings after Tom has gone to bed. The hardest part of the cutting is that the breaker I am using Here is the breaker; it takes a bit of force to cut the bricks! (also under the blue tarp in the pictures below) is great at cutting large straight cuts, but not so good at cutting the smaller pieces and especially the small triangular pieces which are a large part of this design. So I have had to resort to using my Skil saw with a 7" masonry blade to cut the tricky parts. I've got a few more pieces to cut,

If any of you have been following this from the beginning, you have seen that despite the best of intentions, things tend to take a little bit longer than I anticipate. I always forget that a few things can get in the way of completing these types of projects: things like a full-time job that sometimes requires work in the evenings and weekends; a 1 year old, who definitely requires work in the evenings and weekends (:>) and generally the fact that I am not doing this as a full-time job (although I did many years ago). So I thought that 5 weeks would be enough, in terms of actual time working on this project, it has been nowhere near

So over the last week, I have worked on the backyard mainly when I came home from work. Come home, eat, put the baby to bed and move a ton of gravel. Literally. I had to rebuild the ramp because when we constructed the wall, there was no way to get the gravel and pavers back to the area near the deck, so I had to build a solid ramp to get the wheelbarrows filled with gravel etc, up the wall so I could dump the stuff. Fair enough. What has become apparent is that we don't have enough gravel (Called HPB, or High-performance base material) for the entire job. So I have to do some more calculations to figure